Many merchants and/or product marketers, such as providers of consumer goods and services, and other advertisers, are very interested in creating/obtaining lists of potential and/or existing customers, and their associated contact information, and then determining, as precisely as possible, what customers are most receptive to a given product or service and/or offer associated with a given product or service. That is to say, many merchants and/or product marketers would like to establish/create as large a customer list as possible and to create customer profiles for each of their existing and potential customers on the customer list.
To this end, many merchants and/or product marketers currently devote significant energy to creating customer lists, typically by manual means such as writing down contact data, or manually keying customer contact data into one or more computing systems. However, using these methods, when the merchants and/or product marketers wish to contact a given customer, group of customers, or all their customers, to advise them of a special offer and/or provide them with a marketing device, the manually entered customer contact data must be retrieved, copied, and/or transferred to the offer and/or marketing device transmission means. In many cases this can be a daunting task.
In addition, many product marketers have developed, and currently employ, various methods for obtaining information regarding customers of their products and/or services to create customer profiles and/or to determine the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. These methods currently include gathering survey information, such as part of a product/warranty registration materials/process, and then processing this survey information in an effort to establish a profile for a given customer and/or determine the effectiveness of a given marketing campaign for the given customer.
While these current methods for obtaining customer lists and then creating customer profiles for existing and/or potential customers do produce some valuable results, they are limited in that they typically require considerable effort by both the merchant and the customer. In addition, current methods for obtaining customer lists often result in marketing efforts being directed to “customers” who are, in reality, not actually interested in the products and/or services and often view any contact as unwanted and a nuisance.
In addition, current methods for creating customer lists and then creating customer profiles for existing and potential customers typically do not make full use of the fact that many modern customers, and merchants, are “mobile customers/merchants” that regularly use mobile computing systems such as, but not limited to: portable computers; two-way pagers; cellular telephones; smart phones; digital wireless telephones; Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs); media players, i.e., an MP3 Player and/or other music and/or video player; Internet appliances; or any one or more other mobile systems and/or devices.
As a result of the situation discussed above, currently, merchants often spend unacceptable amounts of time attempting to create/obtain lists of potential customers and, in many cases, even when the time and energy is used to create the customer lists, many of these lists include potential customers who actually have no interest in the products and/or services offered by the product marketers and/or merchants. In addition, as a result of the situation discussed above, currently, obtaining accurate customer profile data is far too burdensome for the customer and therefore minimal customer participation is achieved, and/or responses are obtained from only certain segments of customers, typically only those with time, energy, and/or a hidden agenda/motivation.